RE: An overview of blockchain privacy mechanisms and how Zerocoin in Zcoin $XZC (not Zcash) stacks up
Excellent article. PIVX is actually moving over to Zerocoin privacy protocol for most of the reasons highlighted. In fact we've already implemented it successfully on the testnet and will be pushing for full implementation within weeks, once we've finalised setup parameters and GUI. The fundamentals of anonymity are very much the same but our implementation will come with some advancements over most current implementation increasing efficiency & usability. All source code will be open so all projects can audit and use the improvements we've made. We do disagree that leaked setup credentials can lead to forged coins, but agree it can cause zpiv origins to be calculated thus rendering the anonymity useless. However it's not a problem worth worrying about for any of the coins mentioned as they're all well organised and setup. Great to see so much progress in the realm.
Hi @pivx! Thanks for chiming in. Saw the GUI you made for Zerocoin which is pretty neat.
Also good to hear that you would be making all of your developments open source. We have some pretty nice improvements and important fixes in libzerocoin which you might want to take a look at once we release so we can all benefit from the space.
I'm assuming you are still using RSA accumulators in your Zerocoin setup and still require the RSA modulus N ? Where would you be taking the parameters of the accumulator trapdoor p,q from?
If this is the case, then leakage of p,q will definitely lead to forgery of coins but it would NOT break anonymity unless you're not using RSA accumulators in your Zerocoin setup, in which case we would be very curious what you are using in its stead.
Relevant part of Zerocoin paper:
http://zerocoin.org/media/pdf/ZerocoinOakland.pdf
Pivx stands up to the closest of scrutiny - it's making all the right moves, moving slowly (not too much) and making steady progress. Great community and great project and the implementation of zerocoin is another example of this.
Come on @matrixdweller we can be adults here :D